Roland Bouman's blog goes i18n (Powered by Google Translate)

Now that Pentaho Solutions is in print, and the first few copies are finding its way towards the readers, I felt like doing something completely unrelated. So, I hacked up a little page translation widget, based on the Google Language API. You can see the result in the top of the left sidebar of my blog right now:



Using it is very simple: just pick the language of choice, and the page (text and some attributes like alt and title) will be translated. Pick the first entry in the list to see the original language again.

This all happens inline by dynamic DOM manipulation, without having to reload the page. I tested it on Chrome 2, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, Safari 4 and Internet Explorer 6 and 8. So far, it seems to work for all these browsers.

Personally, I feel that the user experience you get with this widget is superior to what you would get with the google translation gadget. In addition, it is pretty easy to to configure the Translator class .

The code to add this to your page is in my opinion reasonably simple:

    <!-- add a placeholder for the user interface -->
    <div id="toolbar"><div>

    <!-- Include script that defines the Translator class -->
    <script type="text/javascript" src="Translator-min.js"></script>
    <!-- Instantiate a translator, have it create its gui and render to placeholder -->
    <script type="text/javascript">
        var translator = new Translator();
        var gui = translator.createGUI(null, "Language");
        document.getElementById("toolbar").appendChild(gui);
    </script>

This really is all the code you need - there are no dependencies on external Javascript frameworks. If you don't need or like the gui, you can of course skip the gui placeholder code as well as the second script and interract with the Translator object programmatically.

The minified javascript file is about 7k, which is not too bad in my opinion. I haven't worried too much about optimizations, and I think it should be possible to cut down on codesize.

Another thing I haven't focused on just now is integration with frameworks - on the contrary I made sure you can use it standalone. But in order to do that, I had to write a few methods to facilitate DOM manipulation and JSON parsing, and its almost certain you will find functions like that are already in your framework.

Anyway, readers, I'd like to hear from you...is this auseful feature on this blog? Would you like to use it on your own blog? If there's enough people that want it, I will make it available on google code or something like that.

"Pentaho Solutions": copies hit the mail

Hi!

Just a few hours ago, I arrived home after a very quiet and peaceful two-week holiday with my family. It was great! I didn't bring a computer on purpose. I brought a mobile phone, but didn't answer that on purpose too :) Result: absolute relaxation, with lots of time to hike, cycle, and read, and occasional visits to musea and historic sites. Bliss :)

Anyway, now that the bags are unpacked, and the kids are asleep, it's time to face the dragon better known as my inbox. What I found brought a big smile to my face:



Yes - it's true!! Copies of my and Jos' book Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL have hit the mail, and at least one copy has reached the Pentaho office.

Pentaho-ers, thanks for your kind email, and thanks for a great product!

I haven't received one myself (yet), and it will probably take some time still to ship the books to Europe. But it's certainly good to see a physical proof of our work.

Anyway - if you are expecting a copy of the book because you pre-ordered one, or if I or Jos promised you a copy, fear not, it should be heading your way. I hope you like it - Enjoy :)

OSCON 2009 Presentation "Taming your Data: Practical Data Integration Solutions with Kettle" now online

I just delivered my OSCON 2009 presentation "Taming your data: Practical Data Integration Solutions with Kettle". I think it went pretty well, and I got good responses from the audience. I did have much more material than time, and I probably should have proposed to do a tutorial instead. Maybe next year :) Anyway, you can find the presentation and the examples on the OSCON 2009 website. The slides are available in pdf format. There's also a zip file that contains the presentation as well as the kettle sample transformations and jobs.

My OSCON 2009 Session: Taming your Data...

Yes!

Finally, it's there: In a few hours, I will be flying off to San Franscisco to attend OSCON 2009 in San Jose, California. This is the first time I'm attending, and I'm tremendously excited to be there! The sessions look very promising, and I'm looking forward to seeing some excellent speakers. I expect to learn a lot.

I'm also very proud and feel honoured to have the chance to deliver a session myself. It's called Taming Your Data: Practical Data Integration Solutions with Kettle.

Unsurprisingly, I will be talkig a lot about Kettle, a.k.a. Pentaho Data Integration. Recently, I talked about Kettle too at the MySQL user's conference, and more recently, at a MySQL university session. Those sessions were focused mainly on how Kettle can help you load a data warehouse.

But...there's much more to this tool than just data warehousing, and in this session, I will be exploring rougher grounds, like making sense of raw imdb text files, loading and generating XML, clustering and more. This session will also be much more hands on demonstration than the Sakila sessions. If you're interested and you are also attending, don't hesitate to drop by! I'm looking forward to meeting you :)

And...because the topic of the session kind of relates to my upcoming book, "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL" (ISBN: 978-0-470-48432-6, 600+ pages, list price $50.00), my publisher Wiley decided to throw in a litte extra. Yup, that's right - I've got discount coupons for the book, so if you are interested in picking up a copy, or if you just want to give one away to a friend or colleague, come find me at my session (or somewhere else on OSCON) and I'll make sure you'll get one. Thanks Wiley!!

Anyway - I'm hoping to meet you there: see you soon!!!

open-msp-viewer: Free XSLT utilities to render MS Project files as HTML web pages

IMPORTANT NOTICE

The old xslt-based open-msp-viewer project is no longer updated. Please find a new and much improved pure HTML version here at github: https://github.com/rpbouman/open-msp-viewer. Thank you for your interest.

Original post below

For my day job, I've been working on a few things that allow you to render Microsoft Project 2003 projects on a web page.

The code I wrote for my work is proprietary, and probably not directly useful for most people. But I figured that at least some of the work might be useful for others, so I wrote an open source version from scratch and I published that as the open-msp-viewer project on google code. If you like, check out the code and give it a spin.

It works by first saving the project in the MS Project XML format using standard MS Project functionality (Menu \ Save As..., then pick .XML) and then applying an XSLT transformation to generate HTML.

Currently, the project includes an xslt stylesheet that renders MS Project XML files as a Gantt chart. To give you a quick idea, Take a look at these screenshots:

and

The web gantt chart is rendered in a HTML 4.01 variant, CSS 2.1 and uses javascript to allow the user to collapse and/or expand individual tasks in the work breakdown structure. Currently, the HTML does not validate due to a few custom attributes I introduced to support dynamic collapsing/expanding the chart with javascript. In addition, the xslt transform process introduces the msp namespace into the result document, which results in a validation error

You can either associate the xslt stylesheet directly with the MS Project XML file, or you can use an external tool like xsltproc.

In the trunk/xml subdirectory, you can find a couple of sample projects in xml format that already have the stylesheet association. I have tested these in IE8, Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5, and it works well in all these browsers. In the trunk/html directory, you'll find HTML output as created by xsltproc.

In the future, more xslt stylesheets may be added to support alternative views. Things that I think I will add soon are a resources list and a calendar view.

Enjoy, and let me know if you find a bug or would like to contribute.

WTF? Apple favicon on the Windows update site?

I just noticed the weirdest thing while visiting the windows update site:



As you can see, the shortcut icon is actually an Apple icon...WTF?!! I looked in the code, and this is the code that sets the favicon:

<link rel='shortcut icon' href='shared/images/banners/favicon.ico' type='image/x-icon'/>

When I navigate directly to http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/shared/images/banners/favicon.ico I get the normal icon, that is to say, this: .When I look with IE6, I actually see that icon as favicon...so the question is, what's up with the Apple icon in IE8?! Do I have some virus or malware that has modified IE8? I googled for the problem, but can't find any references...am I the only one? Anybody else experiencing this?

Starring Sakila: MySQL university recording, slides and materials available onMySQLForge

Hi!

Yesterday I had the honour of presenting my mini-bi/datawarehousing tutorial "Starring Sakila" for MySQL University. I did a modified version of the presentation I did together with Matt Casters at the MySQL user's conference 2009 (video available here, thanks to Sheeri). The structure of the presentation is still largely the same, although I condensed various bits, and I added practical examples of setting up the ETL process and creating a Pentaho Analysis View (OLAP pivot table) on top of a Mondrian Cube.

The slides, session recording, and materials such as SQL script, pentaho data integration jobs and transformations, and Sakila Rentals Cube for Mondrian are all available here on MySQL Forge.

Copyright Notice

Presentation slides, and materials such as SQL script, pentaho data integration jobs and transformations, and Sakila Rentals Cube for Mondrian are all Copyright Roland Bouman. Feel free to download and learn from it. But please do not distribute the materials yourself - instead, point people to the wiki page to get their own copy of the materials. Personal use of the files is allowed. Use these materials for creating training materials of using these materials as training materials is explicitly not allowed without written prior consent. (Just mail me at roland dot bouman at gmail dot com if you would like to use the materials for such purposes, and we can work something out.)